


Knell

by Jaelijn



Series: Whumptober [2]
Category: Blake's 7
Genre: Abduction, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Blindfolds, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, On the Run, Past Character Death, Post-Canon, Post-Gauda Prime, Restraints, Spoilers, Whumptober, Whumptober 2020, hurt little comfort, of sorts, other characters withheld due to spoilers, there is no character death in the fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-05
Updated: 2020-10-05
Packaged: 2021-03-08 03:55:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,613
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26839312
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jaelijn/pseuds/Jaelijn
Summary: The clatter of his gun on the floor sounds like a death knell. He has little confidence in their desire to take him alive – after all, the bounty is just a good with him dead, at this point.Post-Gauda Prime.Written for Whumptober 2020 and the prompt #3: "My Way Or The Highway: Manhandled | Forced to their Knees | Held at Gunpoint".
Series: Whumptober [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1951792
Comments: 6
Kudos: 13
Collections: Whumptober 2020





	Knell

**Author's Note:**

> This one almost wrote itself, once I had the first line. It's a little more experimental than my usual style, but I felt it worked for the story I was trying to tell here.

The clatter of his gun on the floor sounds like a death knell. He has little confidence in their desire to take him alive – after all, the bounty is just a good with him dead, at this point.

He considers trying to goat them into shooting but doesn’t, in the end – cut down unarmed like a dog with his back to the wall is too much even for him; there is more dignity in execution.

There would, of course, be a certain irony in it, a pun that someone he’s once known might have appreciated: His name is Kerr, after all.

“Hands above your head!” someone barks.

He complies with a sneer. He has nothing to say to these people.

His gun is scooped up by someone else, a whisper rises in the group. “Is it him?” someone asks.

He flicks his eyes in the direction, finds them consulting a bounty hunters’ contract file. He glances away. He can do without the memories, right now, and if they have trouble identifying him, he’s not going to enlighten them. He grew his beard out for a reason.

“I think it is. It’s an old photo.”

Out of the corner of his eyes, he sees the file change hands. When he looks over despite himself, he catches a glimpse of the photograph:

It feels like a blow to the chest.

A photograph like that shouldn’t exist, not anymore. It wipes his thoughts as blank as his expression.

He doesn’t ask any of the questions that scream for attention in his mind, just keeps his face blank, his stance casual, his hands in the air.

“Well, bring him,” someone orders, and movement rushed back into the group.

He is pushed against the wall, his hands cuffed behind his back and some sort of sack thrown over his head that chinches shut about his neck so that he can’t just shake it off. He can breathe fine, the cloth is clean, but his vision is reduced to indistinct splotches of light and dark.

They shove and drag him along, across the abandoned complex that he was raiding for food and medical supplies, over a patch of uneven ground and then up an echoing ramp into a dark interior. A vehicle of some sort most likely, probably a ship. He ought to have heard them arrive, but he’s been distracted and tired, and they outnumber him ten to one.

Once the space grows dense with too many people and the hum of machinery, he is given a final, hard shove that sends him crashing to his knees. A sharp electronic hum follows him down and settles into a constant, close buzzing: an electronic forcefield.

He doesn’t bother to explore the edges of his confinement, just settles on his haunches as comfortably as he can with his hands bound behind him and stares and breathes into the fabric of the bag over his head.

He can feel the vibration of the vehicle but can’t work out whether they are still on the ground or in the air. Inertia dampeners have grown damned efficient in the last few years – all the same, he thinks he’d noticed if they had broken atmosphere. Wherever they’re taking him, it’s on the same planet.

Silence hangs heavily over the vehicle, punctuated mostly by his own harsh breathing. He is aware of the presence of his captors, but none of them say a word. There is little movement and less sound.

The landing comes quickly and softly, the explosion of movement startling to his heightened senses. The force barrier comes down and he’s dragged to his feet by his upper arms and forced along, stumbling.

He is beginning to feel claustrophobic, beginning to wonder whether being shot against a wall wouldn’t have been preferrable. At least it would have been quick! For all he knows, they might chain him to a wall and shoot him anyway, without allowing him to see what’s coming.

They take him somewhere very bright, and when they come to a halt and the bag is pulled off his head abruptly, he can’t see anything for the brightness. His eyes water helplessly as his pupils struggle to adjust.

“Put him into the chair,” someone orders from somewhere in front of him, and he’s pushed into a chair and his hands refastened to some kind of armrest. A dark, fuzzy splotch of a person passes before him. “I’ll get him. You can go,” the same person says, and his entourage filters out of the room with the sharp pounding of boots and the soft snick of a door.

For a moment, he is alone.

His eyes adjust to the brightness, and he finds himself in some kind of office, perhaps, or interrogation room – there is a desk and another chair at the other side of it, placed before a massive window through which sunlight is flooding in. It explains the brightness.

The chair he’s in is functional, basic, and the restraints that hold his hands firmly against the armrests aren’t built in. It _is_ heavy, however – it doesn’t budge when he tries to push with his legs. Bolted down, perhaps.

There is little else to see, so he sits back and waits, and puzzles over the photograph that shouldn’t exist. It hadn’t looked like a mock-up, but he has only had a glimpse – it might not mean anything. He doesn’t have enough information to solve this riddle.

He waits.

The door snicks open behind him.

“Well?” the person from earlier asks.

There is no verbal reply, but there must have been some gesture, because the speaker huffs and goes on, “I’ll leave you to it, then.”

The door shuts, and the hairs at the back of his neck stand on end. He knows he isn’t alone, and being watched from behind tickles at his instincts, makes him want to run or twist and shoot. He can do neither, so he doesn’t bother craning his head. He might not have the faintest chance at escape, but he doesn’t plan on giving them the satisfaction of seeing him off balance.

“Avon,” a voice behind him says, and all the carefully laid plans for stoicism go out of the window.

He stiffens in the chair, involuntarily pulling against the restraints. Only the fact that his thoughts are suddenly crashing over each other like waves against a cliff keeps him from trying to twist around.

It _can’t_ be.

It’s as impossible as the photograph.

A fake, too?

Or – neither a fake?

Steps begin to move close and around him, soft-soled, no heavy boots. So like…

When he sees movement in the corner of his vision, he turns his head, after all, follows the man’s progress all the way to the other chair.

He looks older, harder. Not amount of stress has ever been able to wipe the guilelessness from his expression entirely, but it is close now. He’s lost weight, and there is no beard to soften the sharpened contours of his face. He is wearing a dark brown faux-leather jacket thrown over a skin-tight black jumper, nothing like the thin, flowing fabrics he used to like. There is a gunbelt strapped about his waist, with a gun and an extra pouch that can only contain a certain set of tools. He doesn’t sit in the chair but hitches his hip up onto the desk, the expanse of it safely between them, and folds his arms. “Got nothing to say?”

The restraints click as he twists against them.

He disciplines himself into stillness.

“You’re dead,” he says.

He wonders if he’s been drugged. He doesn’t remember when, or how, but then he didn’t either, last time…

“Not me. I went down quickly when the shooting started and had the sense to stay down.”

It makes sense. It’s what _he_ would have done.

He doesn’t believe a word of it.

“It’s a little late for games, don’t you think?” he asks instead and forces his gaze away. This… mirage is nothing he wants to see. “Why don’t you tell me what you want with me and get on with it?”

“Do you know how high the bounty on your head is?”

“I can guess.”

“I don’t have to. 50 million credits, Avon, and that’s one of the lower offers.”

“Perhaps you should hand me in, then. Though I would hate for you to choose the cheapest offer, Vila.” He glances up as he speaks the name, as if by naming it, the mirage would reveal its true identity.

Vila, if it is Vila, doesn’t look happy. “Give me a reason why I shouldn’t hand you in.”

He shrugs as best as the restraints on his wrists allow him. “It will be easier if you kill me before turning me in.”

Something flashes in Vila’s face at that, and for a moment, just a moment, he really believes it’s Vila.

“Does it matter?” he murmurs, only belated realising that he is speaking out loud, and what it sounds like in the context of what he just said.

Vila slips from the desk and falls into the other chair. “That’s not why I had you collected. Did you really think I would…?”

It’s that that makes him finally believe it really _is_ Vila, alive and apparently sane, if not unscathed by the years that have passed. “Wasn’t it you who suggested murdering me on the _London_?” he asks, a final test.

Again, there is a flash of something in Vila’s expression. “I didn’t think you heard that, and anyway I didn’t mean it. You know me, Avon, I hate violence!”

“Do you, still?”

Vila doesn’t say anything to that, just studies him for longer than he is really comfortable with.

“What do you want with me, Vila?”

“I wanted to see whether it was really you, at first. There’ve been so many rumours about your death, your capture, executions, and people boasting about having killed you themselves. I could always tell that none of them had even met you.”

 _At first_. He waits Vila out, used to the flood of words with the core of meaning.

“But I didn’t think you’d made it off Gauda Prime, so I wanted to find out who was pretending to be you persistently enough to generate those rumours, or if there was no one at all.”

“Did you find any impostors?” he asks, with real curiosity. He can’t imagine that there would be anyone interested in being him. Surely the bounties would put people off whatever appeal the name of Kerr Avon might have had.

“No,” Vila says. “Just you.”

“Are you going to untie me?”

“Are you getting careless?”

“Perhaps I’m tired.”

“I think perhaps you are.”

There is nothing to say to that. They look at each other for a long time, until Vila sighs. “What were you planning on doing, Avon?”

He hasn’t had time to _make plans_. “Surviving.”

“If I’d let you go, you’d continue to run?”

“I don’t exactly have a choice. As you say, there are bounties on my head.”

“What if I offered you a new identity?”

“Don’t be a fool. I’d be recognised on sight.”

Vila plucks at his jacket, a nervous habit that he doesn’t remember Vila having when he knew him. “A new identity and my protection, then.”

“Why?”

“For old times’ sake?”

“Nostalgia, Vila? Hardly appropriate, is it?”

Vila pushes to his feet then, dragging the gun out of the holster and placing it on the desktop. If it had been anyone else, he’d have braced himself for death, but Vila, somehow, doesn’t seem interested in killing him. Doesn’t seem interested in being rid of him in other ways, either.

“If you must know,” Vila says as he leans onto the desk in the confrontational way that never suited him, “I’m doing it for Blake, all of this. The rebellion is becoming as corrupt as the Federation, all the bloodlust and the manhunting and the torture. It isn’t what Blake wanted.”

“Isn’t it? He’d have used us, Vila, until we got killed. He _did_ get Gan killed, or have you forgotten?”

Vila’s stare hardens. “He didn’t betray us.”

He glances away, but there is no avoiding the memories. “I know that. And I’m sorry that I shot him.” He twists his hand uncomfortably, and the restraints clank again. “All the same, when did _you_ become a revolutionary?”

“There was no one else left!” Vila pushes away from the desk, pacing an angry circle around the room and him. “You might have said sorry to _me_ , you know! I’m still alive!”

“I could hardly apologise for killing you without having killed you.”

Vila is behind him and something impacts with the back of his chair. A fist, perhaps, or a kick. It probably hurts Vila more than it does him. “Not for the lack of trying!” Vila rages bitterly. “You haven’t changed at all, have you?”

A sigh escapes him. “For what it’s worth, Vila, I am glad you’re still alive. But in my experience being or saying sorry never changed anything.”

“It might have mattered, to _me_!”

“Will it make it undone? Will it bring Blake back to life, or all the rest of them? Will it resurrect Cally, or the Liberator, or Anna–” he chokes the words off. He suddenly wants to get away desperately and pulls so hard on the restraints that it hurts. They don’t give.

Vila has gone very quiet, very still. He can’t see him, but he knows Vila’s still there, his breathing heavy behind the chair he is trapped in.

At last, Vila breathes out in a huff and says, “You never knew what to do with guilt, did you?”

“What do _you_ know about guilt?” he sneers, only belatedly realising that he is echoing someone else, someone long gone.

“A lot more than I know about innocence,” Vila says and moves back into his line of sight, a wry grin twitching at his lips.

He concedes the point. They always understood each other, in that way – criminals both. “I don’t think petty theft measures up to _this_ , do you?”

Vila shrugs and reaches out to unclasp the restraints holding him to the chair. He could make a dash for the gun, lying forgotten on the table, but he doesn’t. He just pulls his hands into his lap and rubs at his wrists where the restraints have irritated his skin. He’s always hated being bound.

“Thanks.”

Vila nods and leans back against the table. “Look, Avon, I could have my people take you back where they found you and set you free, if that’s what you want. But I couldn’t guarantee your safety once you leave, and from the looks of you, you won’t last much longer out there. Being hunted like that, you’ll get caught eventually, I know. Or you could stay. You’d be safe. I’d show you what we’re trying to do here, and if you still want out, you can take that new identity and leave, and take your chances elsewhere.”

“No strings attached?” he asks, wryly.

Vila shrugs again. “I used to like you, and you have nowhere else to go.”

He studies him for a long moment, then pushes out of the chair. He is still taller than the leaning and slouching Vila, but Vila doesn’t flinch away – Vila isn’t afraid, and he may be the only person in the known universe who doesn’t want him dead. Vila is also the only person left in the universe he would grant the right to want him dead. The paradox almost makes him laugh.

Avon holds out his hand. “Then it’s a deal.”


End file.
